Circadian Rhythm Genes Linked to Severe Autism Subtypes

[00:00:00]Another interesting thing that came out of the study, particularly if you're looking at the severely language impaired group, there seemed to be a high level or many let me say genes that were related to circadian rhythm.

[00:00:16]>> Mhm.

[00:00:17]>> Uh that were different >> I thought that was really interesting.

[00:00:19]Yeah.

[00:00:20]>> And the circadian rhythm refers to the sleep-wake cycle in individuals. And at the time, there wasn't a whole lot of talk about circadian rhythm or sleep in autism. It was just some groups began to notice that. So I, you know, initially I have I sort of ignored them. I just scratched my head and I said, "What in the world is this about? Circadian rhythm?"

[00:00:41]And then I, you know, I learned by hearing um other lectures um that circadian rhythm genes may in fact play a role in autism. So then I thought, "Okay, I better go back and look at it." And we looked at it more Yeah, exactly. We looked at the circadian rhythm genes more closely and and so we found a network. I have something like 12 circadian rhythm genes or genes related to circadian rhythm that were affected about but only in the >> in the bottom group.

[00:01:12]>> And what I didn't what I didn't realize until I started talking to parents about our research, you know, I described these different um biological phenotypes associated with the clinical phenotypes that we had identified through the ADI-R, and parents would come up to me after my talk and say, "You know what?

[00:01:31]Uh my child fits into this group, the severe language impaired because the child also has a lot of sleep problems."

[00:01:38]>> Right.

[00:01:38]>> So that kind of made sense, you know? So so that was very encouraging to hear that the kind of um behaviors and phenotypes parents were seeing really related back to the biological phenotypes that we were identifying through these gene expression analyses.

[00:01:57]>> Right.